Inside Bryce Harper’s at-bat for the ages: Phillies star rewatches, relives the swing of his life
CLEARWATER, Fla. — Bryce Harper is sitting there, rewatching the pitch immediately before the swing of his life, and it is a few minutes past 9 a.m. at spring training. It’s been five months. He has since had reconstructive elbow surgery and the Phillies have moved past the bittersweet end to an incredible postseason run. But certain moments will never fade, and Harper is replaying this pitch from Game 5 of the National League Championship Series again and again on a computer screen inside the Phillies’ video room.
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It’s not the pitch.
He leans forward in his chair and clicks the mouse. “I did step out of the box,” Harper says, “and think to myself, ‘How in the hell did you just take that pitch? That’s one of the best pitches you’ve ever seen in your whole career.’”
He does not believe this is hyperbole. Padres reliever Robert Suarez, in his estimation, has one of the nastiest changeups in the sport. Harper clicks the mouse to replay the 1-2 pitch again.
“Because I could see it coming,” he says. “I could see it coming in. And I think I was so locked in on the heater that I was just kind of like, ‘All right, that’s going down.’ Right? I mean, it was such a good placement too.”
He replays it again.
“It’s just that moment,” Harper says. “It’s just those moments that I love. I mean, being able to just be so locked in and taking my time through the at-bat. Like, it’s such a good pitch.”
He replays it one more time. It still happens. He takes the changeup for ball two.
During a 45-minute video room session with The Athletic this spring, Harper relived the most important at-bat of his career — sharing the little things that popped into his mind before he stepped to the plate, what he thought during the one-on-one duel with Suarez, and the bedlam that followed.
It was the only at-bat from the postseason he rewatched over the winter.
“I wanted to enjoy it from a fan’s perspective, I guess you could say,” Harper says. “I really wanted to watch the changeup because the feeling that I had when I took that pitch …”
He stopped himself. The story of this at-bat that will live forever must be told in the proper sequence.
“We’ll get into that,” Harper says.
Between Games 2 and 3 of the NLCS, Harper had a chat with his dad. “You’re letting the ball get a little too deep into the zone,” Ron Harper said to his superstar son. He referenced the at-bat against Suarez, specifically, from Game 2. Suarez started Harper with a changeup in the dirt. Then Harper missed some high-powered fastballs in the zone. He saw a 2-2 fastball at 99 mph down and away, and pounded it into the ground for an inning-ending double play.
“Make sure if you face him again or anybody else that’s throwing hard,” Ron said, “get them in that front window (of the plate) as much as possible.”
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But Harper wasn’t certain he would face Suarez with the National League pennant at stake in the eighth inning of Game 5. He emerged from the underground cage and waited in the on-deck circle with J.T. Realmuto. The Citizens Bank Park grounds crew took extra time to repair the soaked infield dirt. The Padres had jumped ahead in the prior inning when the conditions had worsened, and a return trip to San Diego was in sight. Harper saw Josh Hader warming up in the Padres bullpen. “They need to hurry up this grounds crew stuff,” Harper said to Realmuto. “Like, we need to go. We cannot let him get hot.” Harper, like many in the ballpark, assumed that Hader, one of the game’s best lefties, would be summoned to face him.
But Suarez had not surrendered a home run to a lefty batter all season. And he had risen to the moment in Game 2 against Harper. Now, once Suarez misfired on an 0-2 changeup to Realmuto for a single to left, Harper’s mind raced. “I got an opportunity,” he thought. He savored that moment.
He clicks the mouse to pause the video. He’s still in the on-deck circle.
“I took an extra little like second, really, to see that,” Harper says. “I really took my time with it.”
He hits play. The broadcast shows San Diego manager Bob Melvin. “I took a look at him, too, to see if they were going to do it,” Harper says. They didn’t. Hader was not entering the game.
It takes one minute and four seconds from the moment Harper’s walk-up song, Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me,” starts blasting in the ballpark until Suarez throws his first pitch to him. Harper steps out of the batter’s box. It’s wet. “My footing was just not good,” he says. Then, Suarez steps off the mound. Austin Nola, the catcher, calls timeout.
Harper pauses the video.
“If I rush through this at-bat, or he rushed through this at-bat, it’s not fun,” Harper says. “It’s not good. There’s no way in this moment that this happens if I’m rushing through this at-bat. There’s no chance. I swing at the changeup or I swing through everything else because I’m rushing through it. What is the first thing they tell us when we start playing this game at 3 years old? Take your time. Take a deep breath. Enjoy the moment.”
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This is when Harper remembered what his dad said to him. The “front window” is a phrase Harper uses no less than eight times as he rewatches his seven-pitch at-bat against Suarez.
“So, on this whole at-bat against him, you could tell I was kind of cheating to the heater,” Harper says. “But cheating the right way — into the front window of left-center.”
Pitch 1: 0-0, 96 mph sinker
He didn’t have a hunch about what Suarez would do first. “It was just trying to get a heater in the front window,” Harper says, “and any other pitch, I’m going to try to spit on the best I can. His changeup’s his best pitch. His heater is really good. And I want to get the heater.” Now, as Harper reflects, he sees the value from a dismal September in which he hit .196/.288/.327 as he returned from a broken thumb.
“I think it helped me kind of struggling in the last month of the season like I did,” Harper says. “Because a lot of teams were like, ‘Oh, he’s having trouble with the heater probably right now.’ And they fed me a lot.”
Harper knew Suarez would come with four-seam fastballs up, sinkers down and away, and the changeup. He could eliminate sliders and curveballs because Suarez rarely used them against lefty batters.
“I really didn’t want to swing at his change,” Harper says. “Like, I did not want to swing at his changeup. And it’s very hard to think that because it’s such a good pitch.”
Harper clicks the mouse. Joe Davis, the Fox play-by-play broadcaster, asks analyst John Smoltz how to attack Harper after getting ahead 0-1. Smoltz expects Suarez to elevate a fastball.
Harper nods. “This one,” he says, “is up and in at my face almost.”
Pitch 2: 0-1, 97 mph four-seam fastball
Harper pauses the video again. He rewinds to hear the commentary.
“I thought Smoltzie, what he said about the elevate, I thought he was right,” Harper says. “But when (Suarez) elevated too high, I was like, ‘He can’t do it.’ If he keeps going up there, it’s not going to be what he wants to do.’”
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It’s 1-1. There is no way, Harper remembers thinking, that Suarez will continue to feed him elevated four-seamers. “His bread and butter is sinker away, changeup,” Harper says. He thinks he knows where Suarez will go next.
“You just go up and in at somebody’s face — and you’re not trying to — but it’s a show-me pitch,” Harper says. “It’s a great pitch. So, what are you thinking off of that? He’s going to go 1-1 changeup. Right?”
Pitch 3: 1-1, 98 mph sinker
Harper shakes his head. “It’s a great pitch to hit,” he says of Suarez’s third offering. But he wasn’t expecting the sinker and his swing reflects that.
“It’s a little defensive,” Harper says. “You know?”
But this, in Harper’s estimation, is more a design than a flaw.
“The first pitch of the at-bat that I usually swing at, it’s like, ‘I’m trying to hit it way back,’” Harper says. “And then I kind of dwindle down my swing. That’s not just this at-bat. Like, I do that in all my at-bats. I take my chance on my first pitch usually a lot. Even if it makes me look stupid. I’m just like, ‘Ah whatever.’”
Pitch 4: 1-2, 100 mph four-seam fastball
After fouling off the fourth pitch, 100 mph up and out of the zone, Harper swings his right arm forward to mimic something.
“I just let it get away from me,” he says. “So I just want to get my barrel through. If you see, my barrel is just lagging back here. I mean, it’s that protect-me swing too. I was in the back part of my window instead of through my window. That’s why you see me do that.”
Pitch 5: 1-2, 99 mph sinker
Suarez counters with the bread and butter — sinker down and away. Harper stays alive.
“This was a tough one,” Harper says. “Because this was the same pitch he threw me — maybe a little bit higher — that I grounded into a double play on. Very similar pitch.”
Harper, sitting in the leather chair, recreates his swing to show how important it was that he made contact in that “front window” of the plate.
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“And that was why it was a foul ball,” Harper says. “Off the ground. If I would have just taken that other swing, it’s a ground-ball double play.”
Harper thought he broke his bat. He tapped it on the plate. It’s good. (That bat, by the way, was never used again after this at-bat.) Harper presses play.
“So,” he says, “this is the changeup?”
Pitch 6: 1-2, 92 mph changeup
It is. It’s suggested that he could spend hours talking about this pitch.
“That’s the thing,” Harper says. “Like, everybody said that. Right? Everybody’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it.’ I thought it was a two-seam fastball, down and away. A show-me two-seamer.”
He saw it down, out of the hand, and he was not going to swing. But few hitters in the sport would have had that recognition in that high-stakes moment. Harper pauses the video, then rewinds. Davis’ voice from the broadcast fills the room. “The 1-2 pitch. Takes it low.” Harper pauses it again. It’s quiet. He doesn’t flinch.
He smiles.
“Yeah,” Harper says. “I mean …”
There is nothing else to say.
He was certain, at this moment, that something good could happen. He took the changeup. He thought to himself, “If he doubles up on this pitch, he strikes me out.” Why?
“Because I’m going heater every time,” Harper says. “Because all I’m trying to do is get this heater right now in the front of this window. If he doubles up with the changeup, it’s going to be very tough for me to take that again. Because I’m so ready to go. Right? I’m so ready to go right now.”
His voice starts to rise.
“That was the feeling that I had,” Harper says. “‘Like, I am going to get this heater. I am not missing it. This is all I want to do.’”
He slaps his knee between every word of that last sentence.
“I just want to take my best swing,” Harper says. “And it wasn’t even me trying to hit a homer. I’m so deep into the count now. I’m just trying to have a great swing and put a swing on the ball and keep the line moving. The thought was never, ‘Try to hit a homer on this pitch.’ Because if I tried to hit a home run on this pitch, I don’t do it. I probably ground out. There’s no way I can hit this pitch while trying to hit a homer right here. This is a line-drive swing.”
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He presses play. For five seconds, it’s just crowd noise.
“On the seventh pitch,” Davis says, “Harper hits it in the air to left-center field, back it —”
Harper pauses. The ball hasn’t landed yet.
“All I could think is, when I hit it, I thought to myself, ‘This has gotta go.’ So when I hit it, I was sure, but I wasn’t at the same time until it got halfway there. And then I was like, ‘OK, we’re good.’ Just because it was such a line drive. It wasn’t a majestic one. It was a line drive that just kept going.”
He rewinds. “On the seventh pitch,” Davis says, “Harper hits it in the air to left-center field, back it goes. Harper! The swing of his life!”
Pitch 7: 2-2, 99 mph sinker
Pause. Silence. Then, Harper laughs.
“I love the reaction of everybody,” he says. “It was so funny.”
The thing he’s heard most from people was, “Your face was like nothing had just happened.” Harper said that was intentional.
“I saw everybody going crazy,” he says. “And I didn’t want to miss any of that. This is the moment. This is the moment that you’ve always lived for. As a kid, you dream about it in your backyard, right? These are the moments. So, seeing everybody’s reaction, I wanted to enjoy that moment as much as possible.”
The only outward celebration is when Harper runs his hands across the logo on his chest.
“It’s just such a proud moment,” he says. “This is ours. It’s not just mine, it’s ours. And I love that. It doesn’t say HARPER. It says PHILLIES. It’s all about us. I think that was so cool about our team. It was about us.”
But there was another homage. Harper watches himself circle the bases and, before he steps on home plate, he pauses the video.
“It’s funny,” Harper says, “because my mom, she gave me this medallion.”
When Harper and his brother were kids, Sheri Harper wrote the same thing on their brown bag lunches. She drew an eye, a heart, and the letter “U.” That same sketch is now on the medallion.
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“Before a lot of my big at-bats, I’ll rub it on my bat,” Harper says. “Just to kind of calm me down.” He did it before this at-bat. But he does not always think about the medallion after something good happens.
He did this time.
“Yeah,” Harper says, “I kissed that before I crossed home plate.”
Harper spends the next four minutes dissecting everyone’s reaction to the swing. He uses two screens for different angles. He loves this. He admits that immediately after crossing home plate, he yelled at the Fox camera, “I’m that guy!” This, now, is hilarious to him.
He’s had time to think about this moment in its proper context. He understands how important it was to so many people. It is the stuff of dreams. But dreams don’t always come true.
“For sure,” Harper says. “But, like, there’s always been so many big moments in my life just because there’s been so much expectation. And this is the biggest moment of my career. By far. Ever, in my whole career. Right? Was it the most stressful situation in my career? No. Was it the most intense? No.”
He recalled two pitching outings as a reliever — one in Colorado when he was 11, and another against Cuba when he was 15 and playing for Team USA in the under-16 Pan Am Championships. He kept going.
“I dropped out of high school as a sophomore,” Harper says. “I play my junior year of high school in junior college. Having to be the No. 1 one pick. I have to. I have no (fallback). I can’t go back to high school. There’s nothing else I can do. I have to be the No. 1 pick. Talk about pressure? Talk about people relying on you and telling you, ‘This is how it has to be. It has to work out.’ I’m 16 years old, what do you mean it has to work out? That was the most pressure I’ve ever felt in my whole life. Having to go to junior college and knowing it has to work out.
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“So, these moments are just so much fun for me. This is what it’s all about. This is the game that we play. And so when that happens, you’re excited. You’re ecstatic. But you’re so excited for everybody else around you as well. You’re making things happen for everybody else around you. It’s so much fun. It’s what you dream of. This is what I love. This is what I do.”
He didn’t save just the bat from the swing of his life. He kept the entire uniform. “Cleats, everything,” Harper says. “Like, I kept the whole thing.” One day, maybe it’ll be on a mannequin inside his weight room.
He watches everything after the swing. He does not remember much about being in the dugout. He walked downstairs to the cage after the third out of the inning.
“I had so much built-up emotion because I didn’t really show it,” Harper says. “It was just like, ‘Whoaaaaaaa.’”
Harper glances at the clock. He’s back in spring training mode. There is work to do as he continues the monotonous process of returning from Tommy John surgery. He’s 30 now, and the second phase of his baseball career begins whenever he steps on the field again this season. He is convinced — more than ever — that he has a purpose.
“I absolutely love playing for the Philadelphia Phillies,” Harper says. “I can’t explain to you how much I love it. And how much I enjoy it. I really can’t. I want to play here until I’m 45 years old, and I really believe that I can.”
Maybe. But, as long as the Phillies exist, this swing will be replayed over and over at the ballpark.
“They’re moments you want forever,” Harper says. “I want more of them. This isn’t the only moment that I want.”
(Top image: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: Mike Ehrmann and Daniel Shirey / Getty Images)
